For those of you who don’t know (which may very well be all of you right now), I will be presenting a talk at WordCamp Montreal July 12th. The title of the presentation, if you haven’t guessed, is “Hacking WordPress: Introduction to custom plugins and advanced templating“. I’ll explain how you can use your own plugins and functions to make your WordPress site sing. In other words, it will basically be a relatively improvised primer on the following things:

• Introduction to creating WordPress plugins
• Managing your sidebars and widgets
• Using WordPress’ Codex and API documentation
• Hacking up your templates to use all the power provided by WordPress

If you’re not registered yet, you have until July 9th to do so on EventBrite. For more information regarding WordPress Montreal 2009, check out the official site, mailing list, blog, Facebook group and Twitter account or see what’s going on by looking up the #wcmtl tag.

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Lots has changed since the last article I made about WP-prettyPhoto usage, and so it is time to revamp the instructions, explain new features and hopefully be a bit more thorough. First off, let me first mention the following thing:  prettyPhoto is written by Stéphane Caron. Here are some related links to avoid repeating them throughout this article: Stéphane’s blog, prettyPhoto’s project page, prettyPhoto on GitHub, Stéphane on Twitter, WP-prettyPhoto at WordPress Extend, WP-prettyPhoto Support Forum.

Revision History: This article is intended to document the current WP-prettyPhoto (1.5.1) & prettyPhoto (2.5.2) versions.
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It’s been a while since any activity has happened with prettyPhoto and WP-prettyPhoto. I was waiting for some changes to the prettyPhoto code to release a new version, and Stéphane Caron has released version 2.3 of his prettyPhoto jQuery plugin recently, so it was time to roll out a new WP-prettyPhoto version, 1.2, with all the changes and features that have been suggested since the last release. To skip the blah blah and go straight to downloading, head over to WordPress Extend. more…

I’ve recently coded my first WordPress plugin, for the fun of it. I’ve been using WordPress for some time, and I know PHP quite well, so I figured it’d be fun. WordPress has a weird/interesting way of being extendable. I won’t go into too much technical details about that, but suffices to say that it’s easy yet complicated to perform tasks you want to. Yeah, that weird.

All that being said, I upgraded my WordPress from 2.7 to 2.7.1 in the middle of coding some new features for the latest release of WP-prettyphoto, 1.1. That made me realize that updating WordPress’ core also updates the installed JavaScript modules, namely jQuery (among many others). When I first coded WP-prettyphoto, when things weren’t working I just replaced the jQuery I had with the latest official stable release and things worked fine. I didn’t give it much thought. So when I updated WordPress, all hell broke loose and WP-prettyphoto was metaphorically crying in agony because jQuery wasn’t man enough for it. I then tried performing the same manual updating procedure, and without really surprising anyone — I was alone anyway — WP-prettyphoto was back prettyfying my stuff like a starving fat kid eats a cheesecake.

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WP-prettyPhoto allows you to use prettyPhoto by Stéphane Caron, a themeable jQuery-powered Lightbox clone with WordPress. Check it out on WordPress Extend!

First off, it’s election time in Canada. We have the Conservatives, the Bloc, the Liberals, the NDP and the Green fighting against each other. I never was much into politics, to be honest. I subscribe to the school of people who think every politician is a corrupted one waiting to happen. They promise without delivering, and most of their campaign is based on derogating their opponents and making promises which everyone knows they won’t hold. That being said, a nice site was launched this week, called I Believe In Open. It aims to be some kind of petition (without being one) for better government transparency. It allows voters (me) and parties/candidates to pledge for transparency and openness. So far no parties have pledged though, I’m thinking the first who does will get my vote. Alright, enough politics.

This next week will be exciting! The hockey season is starting, and I managed to get tickets for Friday’s pre-season game in Montreal, which should be AMAZING. I’ll be going with friends from work and the ambience will be insane.

I played with my iPhone a bit today, after having to implement a dual boot on my system (grumbles) because Apple doesn’t support iPhone synchronization on Linux… I found a few good places for iPhone wallpapers, the best one being this Flickr group.

Aside from that, what’s new? Nothing much. Been working quite a lot lately, trying to make my deadlines and side-line contracts at the same time. At least, work’s fun! Hacking up Magento is a challenge, and it’s entertaining. I can’t say the same for the few OsCommerce emergencies that come up every so often…

Heroes season 3 is starting tomorrow! Yay! Everyone has been waiting so long for this, it should be entertaining. I’ll miss the premiere though, as I’ll be playing cosom hockey with NVI’s team… but I’ll definitely check it out Tuesday. We’ll be facing Universal Media… which is already pretty ironic on its own.

So that’s my week in perspective. Eventful and busy. Should be fun!